


Professor Layton and the Master's Last Painting

by Eliza_Farrow



Series: The further adventures of Professor Layton [2]
Category: Layton Kyouju Series | Professor Layton Series
Genre: AU after The Unwound Future, Dubious Morality, Just because you're kind doesn't mean you're good, Mystery, Not complient with real world history, or at least an honest attempt, or geography for that matter
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-09
Updated: 2019-09-24
Packaged: 2020-02-29 01:56:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,527
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18768820
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eliza_Farrow/pseuds/Eliza_Farrow
Summary: Paper instead of skin.Clay instead of bones.Glass instead of eyes.The Professors are called to investigate a painting from which the people have fled. It's an investigation that takes them from the safe waters of Ellchester, to the lower berth of rural Devonshire, to places that should only exist inside nightmares, in search of a monster that could never be real...





	1. Prologue

_It has to be finished. Once this is complete, everything will stop. My magnum opus...everything must stop..._

It was a quiet place, that studio, as one would expect from somewhere buried so deeply in the earth. Thick walls lined the circumference, kept the dirt from imposing on the air inside, but their plaster and paste trapped silence. It clung to every surface in downy strands, layered up like dust. It was dark, but not in the cold manner of caverns, nor the conforming mystery of nighttime black; from the single gas lamp interred in the ceiling, the dark was stained gold, marbled with a burnished hue that fell upon everything unevenly, as though it had hoped for better things to illuminate than that dingy quarter and its sole occupant and would only go about its trade sullenly as a result.

In the centre of that room stood a man. He was neither very tall, nor very large, and held all the innate presence of a desk lamp. Seeing him, one might have felt disappointed and it was certainly the air exuded by the walls; for all their own mystic, they, like the light, might have hoped for a more suitably portent occupant. What stood there instead of some great, unmerciful phantasm, was a mere, man-sized thing, mortal in every aspect and underwhelmingly usual. In appearance, he was the elder of his years and stooped by their weight, each one thrown carelessly over shoulders no longer imbibed with the youthful strength necessary to carry such a burden; he had the middling cast of a man who had once been handsome—regally so—but had fallen prey to time's ravishing hands and withered like an apple or flower. Such was the nature and magnitude of this glory's decay that, were men made aware of it, it's state, like its naturebound counterparts, would have been lamentingly declaimed by many poets. For it was not simply the man's body which had so stooped to time, but his mind. That majesty of genius and skill had surpassed itself, slipping, quite unnoticed, in to quiet, simmering madness.

Locked above, the oblivious world carried on. The room in which he resided, with its walls of stone silence and gold-marbled dark, did not care for his decayed mind any more than he cared for the damp that festered in the corners or the cairns of insectile bodies laid upon the floor.

_Everything must end here, my darling, you see that, don't you? You know it has to stop. I can't sleep. I can't eat. You follow me everywhere... So I have to leave you here...it has to stop..._

In all the world, he had eyes only for the thing he stood before, the vast canvas that the wooden frame that had served him so well held proudly aloft. Like a reverent before the alter of his God, he cowered, making sacrifices of his brushes and staining the burgeoning fresco with both the milk and the blood of their toils. He muttered to it, confessional whispers, hoarse pleas and prayers, each turned upon the deaf ears of his merciless saviour; his most feared, his most beloved, the result of all his efforts...his finale.

_The letters say I should_. Sat on a desk not so very far from the easel, the scrimshaw mutter of encouragement persisted. Throats with wax-seal teeth and ribboned tongues all cheered in their ink-black voices, the rustled cracking of simultaneously deafening and so quiet it may not have ever been. They had told him he should continue. _Finish her painting, and she will leave. Paint what you see in the world, Holt..._

Hadn't a friend once said that?

The painter choked on a laugh, brush faltering; _I haven't seen Desmond in years. Why haven't I seen him?_

Impassible, the walls said nothing. The canvas, upon which he painstakingly daubed the likeness of his beloved nightmare, gave him no response.

So he continued, a desperate appeal to apathetic angels and paper demons. Steadily, the hours passing leisurely by, curious as to this latest development in the painter's abode and lingering, his work drew closer to fruition; firstly, the nebulous haze on the board gained form, becoming that of a woman, standing stately and proud; a frill of darkness flowered about the figure's neckline; the jagged, flat edges of jewels started to adorn her chest; hair or feathers—it was momentarily unclear which the painter had decided to give her, but they began to take shadowy form. From the perspective of a base outsider, it hardly seemed as though the old man was painting at all; rather, he was a magician, or conjurer, summoning forth a figure from the misted realm within the paper.

_Lily! My sweet Lily; why have you forsaken me?_

A rose, single and solitary, found itself upon the woman's breast. It was not red. It did not look like the sort of flower that would condone so frivolous a colour, but would sneer upon the joyful and the passionate, and leech life away with its lustreless resplendence.

_And my little girl, why do you hide from me? Have I done something wrong? Was gone too long? It all ends here, Alice... After tonight, everything stops. I promise._

Black tongues bound the woman's wrists, bracelets so tight they seemed inseparable from skin. Though their elegance only served to enhance that of the faceless woman, there was no mistaking what dark purpose they served—manacles, as though she required confinement beyond that provided by the limits of paper and paint.

Detail after impeccable detail, and then she stood before him, perfection incarnate bar one, faceless flaw. If before, the painter took his time, this last element takes an eternity, an endless purgatory in which he etches her features onto the bare swathe centring her face. The stony crook of a brow ridge, the flattened arc of thin lips, the concave puckering of cheeks and temples...slowly, the nonexistent viewer came to realise that the painting—which, to that point, had borne the makings of beauty—was not a thing of angels at all. To the common man, her jagged, gash of a smile, her limpid eyes limned with fire, and tar-streaked face branded her as unsettling. Despite this, the painter's expression was steadfast; adoration, hatred, rage, regret, and grief...but not fear. Not yet...

A final flicker of the brush—the brush he had used for all of his paintings prior; the brush he was proud to use for his last—a gently, lingering caress of the not-angel's amber eye, before she was complete. He stepped away as a man with a gun pressed to his temple puts his finger on the trigger; resigned to both the fear and finality of that last gesture.

_I am so very sorry, my dearest muse. But this is our end..._

There was no one to congratulate him, on the completion of this, his greatest work. Gaslight fell upon her uneasily, sifting gracelessly over the flatness of canvas in a way that erroneously suggested a less linear contour, and those dispassionate walls cared for art as much as they cared for the man who painted it. With their wounded pride, they bled silence and said nothing. With a dead man's gait, the painter stepped to the door, whereupon he reduced the leniency of the valve ordaining the flow of gas, suffocating the glow until it became the merest thing, the bare bones of a light by which no one could honestly profess to see. Gladly, it receded, dropping from the woman with little hesitancy and retreating across the floor until only the painter was illuminated. With a last regretful look at the portrait no one would ever see, the old master moved to shut the door on his last painting...

There was a noise in the shadow, like someone had torn darkness itself. Then footsteps, starting from the centre of that room where, previously, nothing had stood but the easel.

Screams.

Screams that unravelled a body and left their originator limp and helpless.

Screams that can only be pried from those truly afraid.

Then, a paintbrush, old and worn before its time, clattered meekly to the ground, soon joined by a rose that had never known that roses were meant to be red.

 

And the walls said nothing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Soooo, writing mysteries is an...interesting process. But! I think I've actually got a plot now, so that's good. As with before, I can't promise an update schedule; I write when I have time, and I never have as much time as I'd like.
> 
> I'm not too bad with typos and such, but no one's perfect so, if you do spot anything amiss, please feel free to point it out. Thank you to all of the people who commented on my last work in this series; I hope you enjoy this one too! ;p
> 
> Comments are greatly appreciated!


	2. Chapter 1; The Call on Line 6

It wasn't a particularly loud gathering, but there were enough people engaging in polite conversation—and a select few who, under the influence of passion and a moderate helping of alcohol, had begun academic debates of dubious relevance, sense, and morality—but the low clamour was such that the phone in the hall rang itself hoarse for a consecutive three minutes before anyone took note of it. When it was finally noticed, the company was rather reluctant to interrupt their evening to _do_ anything about it, and so it was quite some time before the call reached its intended recipients.

Professor Hershel Layton stood a little apart from the milling assembly, silently admiring the exquisite detail in the architecture of the hall they had found to house the aftermath of the graduation ceremony. Formal dress had overtaken his customary attire and, while the immaculate outfit helped him blend with his fellow professors, he nevertheless felt uncomfortable in it, ill at ease, despite the suit differing in no way from any other. In one hand, he held an untouched flute of champagne, the other his hat, as though he were afraid the iconic article would manage to slip from his head and vanish. Only one person paid him any mind, the man at his side, who was also unmoving, also silent. Together they watched the world, not a word exchanged over what they saw.

They looked like pieces from a chess set, but it was difficult to say who was black and who was white, or who would move first. Fundamentally, they were very different men. One was distant but patient, mistrustful but kind, ruthless but not without compassion. The other was gentle but firm, immovable but warm, compassionate and resolute. But perhaps the greatest distinction between them lay in their observation.

Layton was, primarily, a man of the past, and saw the history of each object as it trailed its years in a fine down of dust. Everything had an origin, everything had a purpose for the slot it occupied in the present. The ring on the finger of Professor Tallow was old, but polished and maintained so that its gleam matched that of her brighter, newer jewellery, and she fiddled with it whenever one of her students made a speech, pride warring with some sad reminiscence in her eyes. Sometimes, when not conversationally engaged, she would pause and stare wistfully down at it and rub ruefully at an empty slot where a jewel should sit. The finger she wore it on was noted next; it bulged oddly around the confines of something too small for it. A woman of her means could have had it seamlessly altered, but she hadn't, and bore the discomfort with a martyr's pride. _It's something she obtained in her own days at university,_ Layton presumed, _something precious to her. She keeps it as a token._

Beside him, Professor Desmond Sycamore observed the same scene, and, unknowingly, finalised his brother's summary. He was a mathematician, an engineer; he saw patterns, links between happenstances, and slotted them together until the sequencing of events ran like clockwork. Professor Tallow favoured the extravagant and the costly; the ring she wore that night was earnestly plain, but of quality material. An outlier. _She always buys the most expensive thing she can afford; at one time, that ring likely cost her all she had_. She never wore it, aside from this night, each year, consistently for the ten year period he had know her. Always that ring, always this night, always that finger. Her left ring finger, left stridently bare at all other times. Lastly, Tallow favoured silver; the broken little ring was gold, dull and blackening with age. An aberrancy. _It's not to your taste, so someone likely bought it for you. Whoever it was, you loved them, and you lost them, either tonight or shortly after you graduated..._

_You wear it because you miss them._

Completely unaware of her observers, Professor Tallow gave the ring a final, fond adjustment, and swept back in to the crowd. She vanished like a penny in the lining of a suit jacket and took whatever past she harboured with her. Neither Professor moved.

Time had passed since the two ran from London, although both men would be hard pressed to tell you precisely how _much_ time had passed; days melded seamlessly into weeks, and the regulated ticking of clocks had been replaced by the soft slurry of hourglass sand. In any case, they had reached Today unscathed, and were likely to see Tomorrow; for men who had, at one point, expected to do neither, that was enough. Life in the turbulent capital loomed, like fire on the horizon, and was coming for them as surely as dawn, but they didn't have to face it _yet_.

So as long as you kept your eyes dead ahead and ignored the shadows, the lives of the two brothers were as easy as they had ever been.

"Professor Sycamore sir? There's a call for you—line six. They're quite insistent, sir." Maisie Hunt, top of Sycamore's advanced engineering class and prettily resplendent in a silver dress, left so shortly after this announcement that it rather felt as though the words had sprung into existence of their own accord and without the interference of a human throat and tongue. She obviously gave the occurrence no thought, which was made up for by the number of times Layton would remember it and shiver; it felt far too much like fate—like it had been some prophetic force, not a student he knew well—but some malignant, ephemeral, entity that had summoned Desmond to take the call on line six. It felt portent. It felt intentional.

The man in question glanced up from his Chardonnay with a vague sort of smile, before the thoughts swimming liquidly behind his eyes unruffled themselves and were sat back in their neat and orderly queues. He gave the space where Maisie had briefly resided a brisk nod, then turned to his brother with a grinning expression that somehow managed to maintain a veneer of serious professionalism and upmost sincerity. Layton marvelled quietly at the enormous breadth of Sycamore's expressions.

"If you'll excuse me, there is, apparently, a rather insistent telephone that requires my immediate attention." With a flourish, he presented his glass. "Be a good sport and guard this, won't you? I have a feeling I'll want it later." Amenably, Layton took the glass and, after a brief assurance that he would ignore the engineering students' questions regarding the physics involved in planes made from barrels, watched his brother depart back through the crowd in the direction of the hallway. More alert now, he returned to his contemplation of the academic miasma, with distinctly more pattern to the weave of his thoughts.

With Sycamore's recommendations, it had been appallingly easy to secure the teaching position he held. Moorgate University was a massively prestigious establishment and staff there usually had to sport the highest credentials available; Layton did not posses a doctorate, but held something arguably more valuable—the testimony of the elusive and eternally wary Desmond. Layton had been welcomed with open arms into a world he almost didn't recognise.

Moorgate was nothing like Gressenheller had been. It was a sprawling, ancient thing that reeked of importance and history. Magnitude was imbibed in every grey brick, greatness etched into every shingle, and the mullioned windows glared out over the heaths of the purple wracked moors with such a singular massiveness that even Layton's steadfast reason was thrown momentarily off guard. Superstition was almost religion, in some quarters, and places such as Moorgate were both alters and churches to those ghostly beliefs.

The people that resided within the building were similarly odd. Each of the professors was of a silky, shimmery strangeness, cut from mysterious cloth that united them with one another but firmly rejected the world; the sense of distance he had noted on first meeting Sycamore was magnified tenfold as, on that first day, fifty fish-scaled gazes swept eagerly over him. The students were strange too. At Gressenheller, the keenness of learning had been a dull roar, a tame fire curled neatly in its grate, mitigated significantly by the appeals of independent city life. Here, there was a feverish fervour to the students; they learnt swiftly and unremittingly, with determination and dedication that was almost angry.

Desmond had obtained his graduate degree, his bachelors, and his doctorate at Moorgate; Layton thought it showed.

When he had brought these observations up to Desmond, his brother had offered a brittle smile that was calm, gentle, and faintly bitter, a worried crease brushing the skin between his brows.

_"It was said by a great man that intellect was the light of our world. Dark times are coming, Layton; can you blame us for lighting our candles?" Layton considered that for a long second, feeling as though he had blundered into something in the dark and was attempting to make out whether it was a wardrobe or a door._

_"Do you think it's the right thing to do?" He asked at last. His brother's eyes were ruthlessly calm, his irises tinted red._

_"It's the smart thing to do," he retorted, and the pair sat for the longest time, grimly aware that those two things were not mutually exclusive concepts._

They didn't speak of it after that, the discussion locked in a box with many other things that did not need to be said, or could not safely be discussed; a box filled with Targent, and betrayals, and miracles, and a thousand broken things. What was one more secret, one more omission, in that family of lies?

Luke wrote regularly, as did Flora, and Layton exercised great restraint regarding what he told them. Yes; he had a job. Yes; he had an apartment. No; it was not possible for him to fly out to America, but he was more than happy to offer epistolary assistance. He didn't mention Desmond, or the satin strangeness of his fellows, or the amassing army of young scientists, and archaeologists, and engineers with brains made of fire. It took a week for the letters to arrive in their respective places, and each one was torn open with a brief flash of joy followed swiftly by hollow loss as the empty envelope was discarded and the missive's contents devoured. Each letter penned back was a paper tongue feeling out over the absence of where a tooth should be.

So yes; things were better—infinitely better—but, even out of London, there was a dry-weather crackle of suspicion, a staticky something waiting to happen, and at that time Layton could only guess at what form it would take.

"That was odd," Sycamore called through the crowd, carefully elbowing his way through the milling masses with the tact, dignity, and long-suffering air of someone who has had to do so many times before. Layton tilted his head in query, and returned the Chardonnay to its owner. "Do you know the _La Pièce_ museum?" Layton affirmed that he did. "There has been some sort of incident—they were calling to let me, and the other professors with items interred in the museum, that nothing of ours was affected or taken. Everything's on lockdown."

"What was stolen?" Layton asked, taking a small sip of champagne, more out of idleness than an actual desire for the drink. Sycamore treated him to another of his brief, genuine smiles.

"Some artwork has been...mislaid. I took the opportunity to offer what assistance I could," Sycamore said, with uncustomary innocence that was more damning than any of Descole's maniacal laughs. Layton raise a nonplussed eyebrow and his brother elaborated. "They are apparently under the delusion that we are amateur detectives, and have requested that we look over the disturbance. I said we would be there tomorrow."

Layton considered this, preferring to watch the gold in his glass swirl than risk another sip; pearls of it bubbled and frothed as he thought. It had been a while since he took an investigative commission...a chaste smirk worked its way over his lips in a way that those unaccustomed to the subtleties of the Professor would miss entirely.

"Well, I suppose a look wouldn't hurt," he offered as nonchalantly as he could manage, his blood suddenly fizzing like the champagne. A mystery, they had a _mystery_. "A simple art theft to pass the time....we have no other engagements."

"Forgive me Hershel—I neglected to make myself clear. This is much more than a _simple_ art theft." Sycamore's eyes glinted, and in that moment you could see down to the core of him; cunning, clever, and cynical. "You see, it's not the _pictures_ that have vanished...it's the _occupants_."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here's the next chapter!
> 
> Massive thanks to everyone who's reviewed so far, y'all are great. I'm going to try my hand at answering them (though most of my ACTUAL responses to reviews involve incoherent screaming that nobody really wants :p) so if you have any questions or comments, loved it or hated it, please let me know!
> 
> Until next time...


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